ID commentary on animal minds (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, January 15, 2016, 12:04 (3236 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: The existence or non-existence of God is the basic question we come back to in nearly all our discussions, and it will not be resolved by the continued misleading and confusing use of the word “information”, which was the point I wished to reiterate in these posts.
DAVID: You keep resisting the issue of information like it is poison. -No, no, no, no, no, no. How often do I have to repeat that my issue is with the misleading and confusing use of the term, as if somehow it provides an explanation: “everything is information”, information “as the source of life”. This is on a par with Dawkins' “natural selection...explains the whole of life”. It isn't/doesn't, and such vague generalizations should never be uttered.-DAVID: If you will note in my entry on Free Will , Top Down or Bottom Up, George Ellis demonstrates that Top down is a valid concept. I've always found my thinking consistent with his.-That does not mean information is everything, or information is the source of life. -DAVID: My thinking starts with the recognition that there are types of information, descriptive; advanced planning as in designing a building; instructional as in guiding the formation of a building or an embryo; or running a living cell's processes in a properly coordinated fashion to sustain life. -Of course there are different types, though your earlier “informative information” was not very helpful!
 
DAVID: Your complaint that there must be an interpretive mechanism is understood from the beginning by everyone who discusses the issue of the need for basic information at all levels of life. It comes with the concept, so the discussion of information uses a shorthand that assumes all you desire. -No, it is not shorthand. It is woolly thinking and misleading use of language. In article after article, I have pointed out the problems when the author fails to distinguish between matter, information, and the interpretive mechanism. You have eventually in each case agreed. The result of such thinking is absurd statements like those above, and your own “information runs life”, which you hastily changed to “life runs on information” when I pointed it out. Everyone will agree that information exists, but on its own it achieves and creates nothing. The crucial issues are what uses it, how it is used and, ultimately, where it comes from. Please do not try to defend silly statements which you have already acknowledged to be misleading and confusing, and when you yourself have agreed to take more care in future. -DAVID: So to me the Top Down is the mental process that plans and organizes the reality we have from all of the potentialities of the quantum energy that is eternal, since there must be something that always exists and there must be a first cause. And there must be planning which is information. All else is chance.
How do you explain the code in DNA?-And so back we go to chance v. design, and you know perfectly well that I do not believe in chance any more than I believe in an infinite sourceless mind, which is why I am an agnostic. My post was in response to the video you recommended, and I pointed out that “everything is information” is misleading and confusing, and Vedral's various pronouncements are so vague that they tell us absolutely nothing.